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The Music Box: Online Song Database

What is this? We are in the process of building an extensive online database for the songs in Rise Up Singing, Rise Again and our new Seeger singalong songbook. We call it "The Music Box" because it provides an easy way to listen to and learn the songs in our songbooks. Song pages have already been created for all 1200 songs in Rise Again. Song pages for the 1200 additional songs in Rise Up Singing are being created right now and will be part of our Music Box soon.

How do you get to these song pages? The easiest way to get to these individual song pages is via our Song Search page located at www.groupsinging.org/songs/search. You can go to the song page for any song in Rise Again via the song title, song genre, culture (languages, etc.) or chapter. It is also possible to go to song pages using either the Titles Song List or the Book-order Song List(located under Rise Again on our website).The webpage for each song shows you:

where to locate the song in our books (book, chapter, page #)

one of more YouTube links where you can listen to the song

the song genre and who composed it, and

links to online information on the song (on Wikipedia, Mudcat Cafe, etc.)

​Searches by artist. Although this search page above does not yet have a "box" to enter searches for songs written or covered by a particular artist, you can readily find these in another way:

There is a rectangular search box at the top of every page on this website. Enter the name of the artist in this search box - if this artist in our database, the artist's name will appear. Click on the name of the artist and a list of songs that this artist has composed and/or recorded by this artist. If you click on the link to any such song it will take you to the page for that song where you can listen to recordings of that song. (Try this by typing "The Beatles" or "Willie Nelson" in the search box!)

Newly added features of the Music Box:

Starting with any song, you easily can scroll forward or backward through Rise Again. (Once you go to a the webpage for any song, just click on "next" at the lower right of page to go directly to the next song in the book.)

The song search page now allows searches by song genre (e.g. rounds, country songs, children's composed songs, or Irish traditional songs) and by "culture" (language, nationality, or religion).

Artist pages show which songs in Rise Again composed or recorded by a given artist. To get to an artist page, use the general search box as described above. Or if you are on the webpage for any song composed by a given artist, you can click on the name of the artist where it appears on the song page (it will be in blue). If you click on the artist it will take you to that page for that artist where it lists all the songs that that artist has in our database.

Coming soon:

We will be adding all 1200 songs in Rise Up Singing, so you can find which songbook a given song is in and learn the songs you don’t know in RUS.

Improved artist searches directly from the Music Box song search page.

Other things being built / added to the Music Box:

Searches by song subject, Broadway shows & films, and holidays

English translations for songs in languages other thn English

Alternate lyrics besides the lyrics included in our books (e.g. for traditional songs)

Leadsheets for some of the harder to find songs

The addition of the 80 songs in Pete's autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone.

Needless to say it is taking a lot of work to build this database - although much of the information on the songs in Rise Again has already been collected in the database being used to create our new book. We welcome new volunteers to help create this database and keep it up to date!

If you would like to work on the database, contact us at rasongbook@gmail.com. All work is done online, so people can help out from anywhere there is internet! Videos of songs on Youtube often "go down" over time for various reasons, so please email us to let us know of any broken links in this database or want to provide video suggestions or other info we can add to the webpages for any of the songs in our books.

Rise Up Singing

If you don't get a response via email or need to reach us quickly feel free to call us at 413-256-8596. (We often screen calls so it is good to talk into the voicemail and we may pick up when we hear your voice and you aren't a sales call.)